A young student is surprised by outdated ideas and thoughts in one of Jordan’s leading schools which routinely hires the best teachers, gives them enough time to prepare, and works on improving their educational skills. A teacher provided his students with famous sayings to comment on. One of those sayings is for the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz- the only Arab to have ever won the Nobel Prize for literature. The sayings states: “when a woman gets angry she loses one fourth of her beauty, half of her femininity and all of her love.”

The young student was angry, yet she didn’t lose her beauty, femininity or her love, but she did object to this sexist saying. She said that such saying encourages the stereotyping of women and thus increases the discrimination that already exists in our society. The student objected to her teacher that Mahfouz didn’t speak about human beings (both male and female) but that he specified women and focused on their beauty, femininity and love rather than their mind or ideas.

The teacher was surprised at the strong comment of one of his students and didn’t want to continue the discussion, especially after he was able to get a few of the students to agree with the saying as a given which further angered the young female student.

This incident took place in a highly qualified school with modern and sophisticated educational program. One wonders how government schools and other private schools that don’t provide the environment for open thinking and stress rote education perceive women.

It seems we are fighting a nearly lost battle and we are clearly swimming against the tide on the issue of equality.  Our schools on all levels still teach students that women are somehow less important than men and that all we should care about is women’s beauty,  femininity and love.

This attitude, unfortunately, is not divorced from the general educational system, which looks away at violence in schools at all levels. Physical and verbal violence are prevalent throughout the school system, starting from preschool and continuing throughout all educational levels. It is hard to find a school in Jordan in which teachers don’t scream at their students. If a teacher tries to be different, other teachers or even principles would insist that without the teacher acting tough students will rebel.

Stereotyping of women is not restricted to education, even if this is a key sector. For sure we find this problem in religious sector, were discrimination and the feeling of inferiority by women is legitimized using religious text that are largely out of context. The same applies to society which regularly repeats these outdated concepts, treating it as normal. Discrimination against women continues in the workplace. Until very recently one of the most important banks in Jordan let go of their women employees once they married so as to save from paying maternity and other costs. In another case, bank mangers have been known to parade women applying for secretarial jobs as if they were in a beauty contest, turning the women to a mere commodity

It is high time that we exit from this stereotypical and demeaning approach to women and focus on a simple equation. Active women have responsibilities and therefore naturally expect equal rights from society.

Read the article in Arabic